Knox County hired Sword & Shield Enterprise Security to look into why the county election commission web page suddenly crashed the night of May 1, the primary election.

Author:
WBIR

Published:
11:20 AM EDT May 11, 2018

Updated:
6:00 PM EDT May 11, 2018

Knoxville — A burst of web traffic and what appears to have been an active attack contributed to the Knox County Election Commission's web page suddenly crashing on Election Night, a review released Friday found.

"While the intention of the attack cannot be definitively known, the overall effect was very similar to a (denial of service) attack," the summary by Sword & Shield Enterprise Security Inc. states.

Starting about 8 p.m. the Election Commission's page became inaccessible for more than an hour, right before the commission was to release early election returns. The incident had no effect at all on the commission's vote tallying and compilation, authorities say.

High server activity and the active attack mostly likely led to the website outage, the report states.

A distributed denial of service attack is one in which someone is deliberately trying to stop web users from accessing information by overloading servers with a massive amount of requests with spoofed IP addresses.

A DDoS attack can stop a user from getting to websites and email, and often employ a 'botnet' to do the dirty work-- a network of malware-infected computers all over the world that a person with malicious intent can discretely take control of and flood a single website domain with requests until it overloads and crashes the server.

From 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. May 1, Sword & Shield found, requests came from some 65 countries to access the commission web page. Requests from another 33 countries were identified during other parts of the day, the review showed.

Sword & Shield looked at IP addresses in data logs to identify traffic coming from the various countries.

Canada, the United Kingdom, Chile, France and Italy were among the countries generating the most traffic the night of May 1. Other European, Asian and Central American hits were identified.